That was her older sister Julie Marie Bennett's birthday. Julie was just a year older, her "built-in best friend'' who she lost in 1977 when Julie's body was found drowned in Johnson Creek in 1977. Julie was 15.

The Milwaukie girl's death was long classified as accidental, but her family suspected she was killed by a man she had met at the park the day she disappeared.

Jan Terry felt her sister was sending her a message to pick up the phone and reach out to Portland police.

"I knew that was a way of Julie telling me to call,'' Terry said in court Friday.

Terry called the Portland police Cold Case Homicide Unit, spoke to several investigators and two days later, Detective Jim Lawrence went out to meet with Terry and her family. Lawrence stuck with the case. Yet in 2010, Lawrence told Bennett's family there wasn't enough evidence to link who they suspected to the crime, unless he were to confess, and he didn't think that was likely, Terry said.

"That's when I started praying,'' Terry said in court Friday. "And I think this was God's answer.''

"I knew that you, Cutlip, was responsible for my sister's death,'' said Terry, now 51, seated beside prosecutors as she addressed him in a courtroom packed with relatives of the three victims. "It haunted me for many, many years...The not knowing and wondering and guessing was agonizing.''

"A little piece of all of us died that day,'' Terry said. "You will finally have to pay for what you did to my sister. I'm sure Julie is smiling down on all this and saying, 'thank you for caring.' ''

Cutlip, a balding, thin wisp of a man dressed in the standard blue jail garb and seated between his lawyers, looked down at the floor.

"I"m extremely grateful you'll be locked up for the rest of your life,'' Terry said. "People who hurt innocent children are the worst of the worst.''After skipping out of Oregon and failing to report as a sex offender
for years, Cutlip was arrested in July 2012 once he called 911 in
Brownsville, Texas, and told police there he wanted to talk "about some bad things he had done in the past.''

Cutlip admitted to drowning the 15-year-old Bennett in Johnson Creek after meeting her at Johnson Creek Park in April 1977. Police said he lured her to his nearby cabin, forced her
clothes off and sodomized her for nearly two hours. When Bennett
threatened to alert police, Cutlip decided to kill her, detectives said
he told them. Bennett was the only one of the three victims he could
identify by name, police said.

His third killing occurred in Portland in the summer of 1993, shortly after Cutlip was released from prison
on sodomy and burglary convictions. Police identified his victim as Nielen Loribell Doll, 33, of
Spokane.

She had come to Portland to find her three sons, who were the
subject of a custody dispute. Cutlip said he met Doll at a bar, they
shared methamphetamine and he took her back to his Northeast 29th Avenue
apartment. When she refused to get tied up and have sex, Cutlip held
his hands around his neck until she went unconscious, pulled off her
pants and attempted sexual intercourse, police said. He put her body in a
sleeping bag and dumped it near Oxbow Park.

"You're a sick individual. I hate with everything in me that your face is the last thing that my mother saw. I don't forgive you...You should suffer long. May you rot in hell,'' wrote Doll's daughter Tracy Lynn Hales, in a statement read in court by Detective Meredith Hopper.

Carlson's daughter, Julie Robinson, said Friday she learned of her mother's
death a month before her 15th birthday. "I've struggled with how to
grieve the loss of my mother, whom I never really got a chance to
know,'' she said. "And how to fully grieve her death when the details of
which remained secured in a file...her possessions locked up in a
storage unit as evidence.''

She said she was extremely relieved
when she learned of Cutlip's confession, and is grateful to Detectives Lawrence and Hopper, and prosecutors for ending "the wondering of the last 38
years.''

"I'm not sure if we'll ever truly know what possessed
this man to come forth and confess to these crimes. Nor does it really
matter,'' Robinson said Friday. "Whatever the motive, I'm grateful to know the truth.''

Cutlip avoided eye contact with the victims' relatives as they spoke. His lawyer John Gutbezahl, said that while it's probably not satisfactory to the victims' families, "Mr. Cutlip has taken responsibility for his acts. Without him coming forward, these cases most likely would have remain unsolved.''

Cutlip declined to speak. He stood between his two lawyers and rolled his eyes to the courtroom ceiling as Multnomah County Circuit Judge Eric Bergstrom sentenced him to three consecutive life terms in prison, with no chance of parole or appeals.

"Mr. Cutlip,'' Bergstrom said. "The damage you have done is incomprehensible.''